Do Environmental Reviews for Road Projects Help the Environment?

It’s been more than 40 years since the National Environmental Policy Act was enacted. In that time, America has built a lot of emissions-inducing, land-devouring highway infrastructure despite the environmental review process mandated by NEPA. It’s fair to ask: When it comes to transportation infrastructure, does environmental review make a difference for the environment?

The $1.1 billion expansion of the SR 400/I-285 highway interchange in Georgia was able to escape a larger environmental review process. Image: GDOTTo comply with federal environmental law, transportation agencies like state DOTs must hold a number of public meetings and produce a planning document, typically filling several hundred pages, before building a highway expansion.

When it’s that easy for agencies to build huge highway expansions that will fuel for sprawl and pollution, the environmental review process feels broken. Is it? And if so, can it be fixed? I reached out to two attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center for some context. Here’s what they said.

Transportation agencies can game the system (but recent court cases may make that harder)

Brian Gist. Photo via SELC

Brian Gist, an SELC attorney who focuses on Georgia, says there isn’t a problem with the way the environmental laws are written per se. The problem is that transportation agencies can game the system based on how they define the “impacts” of a project.

For example, when transportation agencies conduct an air quality analysis, they often claim a road expansion project will be a net positive for the environment because the assessment assumes it will reduce congestion and idling. This overlooks the long-term effect of many road widening projects, which lead to more driving and wasteful land use over time.

“If you take a very narrow view, it’s very easy to come to a finding of no significant impact,” said Gist. “It’s a question about where you draw the line about what impacts are attributable to this project.”

A recent slate of legal decisions have pushed back on transportation agencies that play fast and loose with their analysis, says Gist, including the challenge of Wisconsin’s $1.7 billion “Zoo Interchange” project. In that case, advocates successfully argued that the state had ignored the land use effects of the project — specifically, that it was likely to promote sprawl — and its impact on transit-dependent people.

The fix is in

Hunter via SELC

Agencies are supposed to consider a range of options for a given transportation corridor before deciding what to build. But really, they know what they want to build all along, says Kym Hunter, an SELC attorney who focuses on North Carolina. What she sees almost uniformly is transportation agencies deciding what project they prefer and then cooking the books, more or less, to promote that outcome against the other options they are forced to consider.

“What the law requires is for them to look at the bypass and for them to look at other alternatives,” she said. “But they go into the process knowing that they want to create the bypass. The first thing they do is create these forecasts of traffic for the future. They make it look like only by building this bypass are you going to be able to do anything about congestion.”

For instance, traffic flows at 40 mph on the road today, but NCDOT says that in the future it will slow to 20 mph.

“To get to those forecasts, they use this assumption that growth just continues regardless of this congestion,” she said. “They’re basically just assuming in their modeling that the infrastructure exists to keep up with that growth.”

In that case, SELC sued and a court ruled in 2012 that the state had failed to consider the potential impact of the road in promoting sprawl.

Hunter said there is also a discrepancy between what these agencies say in the “political realm” and what they say in formal reporting to the federal government. They might tell the public that the project will spur growth, but in official documents, they will deny the project will have any impact on the location or quantity of development.

“They say, ‘Look, all this growth would happen even if you didn’t build the road. Even though we expect that this area is going to grow massively in the future, we’re saying this is not attributed to this road,'” she said. “It’s kind of this circular logic.”

Public input is mostly for show

There isn’t much of a role for the public to play if the state agency starts out with a plan and uses the environmental review process to justify it, Hunter says.

When advocates pushing for an alternative to road expansion realize the agency has already made up its mind, they often give up. When they do persist in trying to affect the project, they are at a big disadvantage, Hunter says.

Part of the problem is that environmental review statements are “opaque and highly technical documents.” Buried deep within these reports are the dubious assumptions about pollution, traffic, and sprawl that courts have recently shot down. Because these assumptions might only show up in traffic or air quality forecasts, for example, they can be nearly impossible for an ordinary person to identify.

To make matters worse, it can be hard for outside groups to find an expert engineer to help, because alienating the state DOT could be bad for business. In some cases, where an engineer has challenged state assumptions, the DOT has retaliated.

In 2013, advocates in Oklahoma City, including a City Council member, attempted to challenge the state’s decision to replace a segment of I-40 near downtown with a highway-like road. The group urged the state to consider reestablishing the street grid instead, and the Federal Highway Administration got involved, forcing the state to consider the grid. But not surprisingly, the state ultimately used its authority to reject that option and move ahead with the surface speedway plan.

Oklahoma City advocates, with help from FHWA, were able to force the state to consider restoring the street grid as an alternative to replacing I-40. But the state ultimately rejected this option. Image: ODOT

Federal approval is basically a rubber-stamp

The Federal Highway Administration very rarely intervenes to stop a project based on faulty projections or other technical aspects of an environmental review.

“FHWA has said if NCDOT wants to build a highway, their role is to help them make that happen, they’ve said that very expressly,” said Hunter. “I have seem them starting to get a little more involved in that review, especially when they anticipate that there might be litigation.”

Ultimately, unless projects are successfully challenged in court, flawed environmental impact statements are not likely to face much of a challenge from the FHWA, Hunter said.

There are a few reasons the feds tend to just go through the motions. For one thing, FHWA regional offices don’t have the capacity to unpack all the forecasting and assumptions in an EIS, Hunter said. In addition, it can be politically thorny for federal agencies to challenge the work of state DOTs, particularly when states have the backing of powerful business and construction interests.

FHWA could step in without getting too entangled in individual project approvals, Hunter suggested, by issuing guidance about how to conduct the contested aspects of environmental reviews.

“There are standard practices used by these consultants and used by state DOTs that basically have these assumptions embedded that a lot of courts have rejected,” she said. “I think that there could be more guidance or rules to make sure those assumptions are at least being checked.”

Ultimately, however, Hunter thinks any reforms will be of limited value as long as state transportation agencies continue to develop projects with a predetermined outcome in mind — and, she says, they almost always do.

Most Recent

This piece glosses over a fundamental issue: environmental review laws are meant to provide information, not technical approvals or disqualifications for projects. A DOT can find significant impacts via an EIS and still proceed with a road project with no legal problems. Contesting the findings of a highway expansion EIS is just one tool for sustainable transport advocate in the ultimately political process of steering transportation investment in better directions.

Alexander Vucelic

$1.1 billion for one single interchange in Atlanta could have built between 1,000 and 5,000 miles of protected Bike Lanes.

The entire City of Atlana and most of its suburbs could have a complete Dutch level of cycling infrastructure instead of this interchange.

Miles Bader

Heh…. I notice that in that “artist’s view”, the land under the highway interchange has been colored an attractive spring green—like a park!—whereas the surrounding area (which actually seems to have trees and stuff) has been desaturated to make it look drab and uninviting…..

Coincidence?

Larry Littlefield

You’re forgetting the worst aspect of all.

The environmental review process does have a real, negative impact on mass transit, infill, and other types of development that is actually good for the environment. They have less money and less clout behind them, and so can be tied up in court by NIMBY activists on the basis of the environmental review.

I have noticed for years that “artist’s views” depict healthier trees than one usually finds in the area. On schematic views, the part with all the trees is usually a parking lot.

Brandon

This is basically how the DOT thinks. The way the think about safety is the same way they think about the environment.https://youtu.be/P9BUyWVg1xI (Thanks to strongtowns.org)

Kayla

nothing makes up for a lack of good public input. Even the best laid plans will fall apart without community support.
Environmental reviews should be paired with community health impact assessments and extensive public engagement and design charrettes to be truly beneficial for the community.

neroden

If significant impacts in the form of air pollution in a nonattainment area are found, then no, the DOT *can’t* proceed. Not because of NEPA but because of the Clean Air Act. That’s one reason attacking bogus EISes works — in an area which is already non-attainment the state *has* to claim that the project won’t make the air quality worse

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

In case you were wondering what a $1.1 billion highway interchange looks like, feast your eyes on this rendering from the Georgia Department of Transportation. In an effort to “ease congestion” on this confluence of highways north of the city, Georgia will spend three-and-a-half years widening about four miles of I-285 and about one mile of SR 400, […]

Highway projects can take 10 to 15 years from planning through construction. The length of the process leads to cost overruns, some due to inflation, some from having to pay engineers and contractors for years on end. No matter how you feel about the worthiness of road capacity expansion, if a project gets built it […]

If it seems like we’ve been singling out Governor Scott Walker and Wisconsin DOT a lot lately, that’s because WisDOT is such an excellent example of what a highly dysfunctional state transportation agency looks like. The latest foolishness: a billion-dollar proposal to double-deck part of a Milwaukee freeway. Milwaukee is a city that lost 0.4 percent of […]

At $950 million, rebuilding and expanding the interchange of Georgia 400 and Interstate 285 in suburban Atlanta will be the costliest road project in the state’s history. Project proponents argue it will relieve congestion for the 365,000 vehicles that pass through the nexus of these two highways each day. But they’re fooling themselves if they believe that, writes […]

Perhaps you’ve read recently about the city of Detroit’s financial woes. The pensions of public employees are on the chopping block and Detroit may have to sell masterpieces from its art museum as it negotiates bankruptcy proceedings. But the transportation agencies that have saddled Detroit with a sprawling and expensive road system certainly aren’t scrimping. They […]